Having been writing newspaper columns for a long time I get the occasional irresistible urge to offer fatherly advice to people who came to the game more recently. This advice is ignored, of course, as is only proper. But it makes me feel better. So here we go.
If you are a columnist you should not use the space allotted to you to rebut or dispute criticisms made of you elsewhere. There are several good reasons for this. One is that your first duty to your readers is to be entertaining and informative. A recitation of your virtues is likely to be neither. Regular readers have already decided what they think of your opinions and prejudices. They are not going to change views formed over numerous readings of your previous efforts just because you say so.
Then there is a temptation to be less than explicit in stating what you are complaining about. I was flattered to find Alex Lo responding to one of my comments about his work, but the reference was carefully anonymised and I suspect a lot of readers did not understand what was going on. As I have maybe 100 readers and the Post, I think, still has about 100,000 it is conceivable that 99,900 readers were neither convinced nor entertained; they were just baffled.
Then if you do explain clearly what you are disputing, you may well introduce a lot of people to a criticism which they missed. Michael Chugani was complaining last week that some writers in the Chinese press call him a “Leung fan”. I imagine I was not the only reader to whom this came as a complete surprise. It had not occurred to me that Mr Chugani was a Leung fan, though having got the idea into my head I was not helped to get rid of it by Mr Chugani’s defence, which seemed to be that he is a fearlessly independent thinker who just happens to agree with Mr Leung about everything except television licences. Still Mr Chugani is entitled to his opinions, whatever they are. What bothers me about him is the contrast between the fearless piranha in print, and the fawning sycophant on television. I understand that different employers want different things, but this is not a happy picture for someone who frequently accuses other people of hypocrisy.
And he went on to make a catastrophically misguided defence of media owners who curb or slant coverage because they have business interests in China and do not wish to offend the authorities there. Why, Mr Chugani wondered, was it OK to close a loss-making publication “for business reasons” but a source of bitter complaints if you modify coverage “for business reasons”? The answer to this question is simple. Because “business reasons” encompasses a wide range of possible behaviours, some of which may be objectionable while others are not. Someone who closes a loss-making magazine is merely executing a sentence already passed by readers and advertisers. No enterprise can go on losing money for ever. An enterprise which is incorrigibly loss-making has failed. It is like a racehorse with a broken leg, just waiting for the man with the bolt gun and the trip to the dog food factory.
The media owner who orders his staff to avoid “sensitive” stories, on the other hand, is responding to business reasons extraneous to the business itself. He is in fact modifying the service presented to the public in an effort to protect his personal financial interests. Journalists are supposed to avoid conflicts of interest. If your savings are invested in Megabucks Corp you will not (or at least should not) be allowed to cover their activities. Clearly if you come across a story which is going to depress the share price you will be tempted to overlook it. Coverage should not be modified to suit the personal interests of the reporter. And it should not be modified to suit the personal interests of the proprietor either. Proprietors have the opportunity (though not all of them take it) to have their pictures in the paper, to encourage policies which they conceive to be in the public interest, to choose people whose instincts they share to run the publication. That does not mean it is acceptable to trim coverage so that your widget factory in Dongguan will not be given a hard time by the locals. Journalism demands some level of honesty. A newspaper which is not making every effort to tell the truth will sooner or later start telling lies. I fear that Mr Chugani sees this coming and is preparing not to notice.
tim's experiment 